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Cephalonia a treasured island September 9, 2007

Louis de Bernières on how a change of holiday destination led to the writing of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

For much of my adult life my ideal holiday was to load up my Morris Traveller with camping equipment and drive around France. I have some French both in my blood and in my temperament, and it’s the country I love best. I usually kept off the péage and stuck to the N roads, because then you can stop to eat in village restaurants, and for sight seeing and walking. “Le camping sauvage” is illegal in France, but in fact nobody really gives a damn, as long as you don’t make a mess, don’t stay too long, and ask permission if anyone is about. France is much bigger than Britain, and much less densely populated, so it’s easier to disappear into the woods and fields, and put up a tent. If the weather gets too appalling, there are plenty of little hotels where one can seek asylum. One of the nicest things to do is have a destination, but to get there and back slowly, so that you have a couple of days al fresco after having spent 10 days in a place like St Remy de Provence, or Arcachon. Back in the 80s my girlfriend Caroline put up with these holidays for a while, and I like to delude myself that she enjoyed them, but there came a time when she said “Please can we do something other than drive around France in the Morris?” and I said “OK, you come up with something.”

On the bus from the airport in Cephalonia, the tour guide kept mentioning the earthquake in 1953. It didn’t take long to realise that the islanders are still obsessed with that dreadful catastrophe that destroyed all the architecture that they had inherited from the Venetians. By this time I felt that I had come to the end of my Latin American period, because the next volume would have been about a dictator, but lately all the republics, with the exception of Cuba, had suddenly democratised and made the project anachronistically pointless.

It was savagely hot in Cephalonia. Caroline sat with a wet towel wrapped around her head, and I got sunstroke as usual. I quite enjoy the hot and cold shivers, but not the diarrhoea and the stinging. We had hired a motorcycle, and I spent a lot of time riding about just admiring the scenery. It was back then that I realised that Greek communists don’t love their country, because they cover even the beauty spots with their hideous red graffiti. I passed a pine marten, squashed in the road, and that gave me the character of Psipsina. I watched a lovely young woman waiting in the cafe next door to ours in the main square of Argostoli, and she became Pelagia. There was a man who herded his goats past our valley every evening, and he became Alekos. The most important thing was hearing that the Italians had invaded during the war, and that in the main they had got on reasonably well with the locals. They had no theories about racial superiority, and the worst thing said about them was that they were chicken thieves. They behaved exactly according to stereotype, which of course means singing, flirting, footballing, and playing guitars, mandolins and accordions. My father was in the Italian campaign, and has the same kind of memories. Cephalonia was already very Italianate anyway; the local music consisting of cantades whose tunes are Italian, but whose words are Greek. The Germans, by contrast, were arbitrary and brutal, and liked to march about to brass bands. The junk shops of Greece are still full of their flugelhorns and tubas. There was only one romance between a German and a Greek on Cephalonia, and she had to leave after the war, but there were plenty of Italian/Greek ones. Since there has always been a literature of romance “across the barricades”, it seemed a good idea to add to it.

When I got home I wrote to the Historical and Cultural Museum of Argostoli, which was run by a woman called Helen Cosmetatos. She was so formidable that during the war even the Germans were frightened of her. She sent me a long reading list, and the period of research began. I had had Greek neighbours before I moved to Earlsfield, so I used to pop over to Raynes Park to ask them important things such as “How do you say ‘fuck off’ in Greek?” Once I had a truly extraordinary stroke of luck when someone turned up at their house who had been in the earthquake.

I immersed myself in everything Greek and Italian. I pillaged Charing Cross Road for old history books and memoirs, I made Greek food, listened to the music, read the writers. I read all of Kazantzakis, for example, and discovered to my amazement that the Greeks had by far the best modern poets and composers. I am still completely in love with them. I bought a superb mandolin in Portugal, and learned to play the things that Corelli would have played. I used to gloat about how much Corelli would have loved that mandolin.

The book was a pleasure to write, and I wrote it at exactly the right time in my life. It has a young man’s energy, but the balance of someone on the cusp of middle age. I had recently been able to give up teaching, and was exhilarated by that supreme and longed-for liberation. I had yet to experience any weariness with the literary world, and was full of the wonder of being a published author. Caroline was a complete sweetheart and everything was still going well with us. The book was framed around some hellish events, but when I look at it now it seems to glow with the kind of light that overpowered me when I first went to Cephalonia. It isn’t my masterpiece, because that’s what the subsequent novel Birds Without Wings is, but it is the book that entirely reconfigured my life. People often irritate me by saying “I loved your book”, as if I had never written any other, and they never can remember the title correctly. My favourite is Captain Gorilla’s Mandarin.